Thanks to a serendipitous discovery and a lot of painstaking work, scientists can now build biohybrid molecules that combine the homing powers of DNA with the broad functional repertoire of proteins -; without having to synthesize them one by one, researchers report in a new study. Using a naturally occurring process, laboratories can harness the existing molecule-building capacities of bacteria to generate vast libraries of potentially therapeutic DNA-protein hybrid molecules. The findings are detailed in the journal Nature Chemical Biology .
Two of the most common building blocks in biology are nucleic acids -; used for making RNA and DNA -; and amino acids, which make up proteins. We have these two sets of biological molecules that do very different things, and, for decades, chemists have been trying to integrate them into the same molecule. If you can make a complex protein and then put a nucleic acid on it that makes it go exactly where you want it to go because it will bind to specific regions of DNA or RNA, you can build a precision drug.
" Satish Nair, Professor, Biochemistry, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Such drugs can be used to interrupt various disease-promoting processes in the cell, blocking the transcription of mutated genes, for example, or binding to pathogenic noncoding RNA molecules to stall their activity, Nair said. The initial discovery was serendipitous, he said. He and his colleagues had been looking for proteins that bind to metals when they.